VeriSign CEO on Commercializing the Internet

mdj writes "CNET has an interview with VeriSign CEO Stratton Scalvos, who says it's time to commercialize the internet's infrastructure and 'pull the root servers away from volunteers who run them out of a university or lab.' He admits that's going to be 'unpopular.'" Because, after all, taking the root servers away from bright, educated comp-sci longbeards who have nothing better to do than to make them run well, and putting them in the hands of MBA bean-counters who don't know what TCP/IP is, is a sure-fire way to improve reliability.

Comments

Approval rating

[turg]

Last month Mr. Scalvos's approval rating went down to 3%. Think it will be lower this month? (vote here - bottom of page).

Re:Approval rating

[Chicane-UK]

Whoa! No kidding.. seems to be getting about 1 or 2 negative votes PER SECOND.

Go Slashdot!! :D

Tell them you want VeriSign stopped!

[SEE]

1. The Department of Commerce; VeriSign's contract to operate .com and .org was originally with them.
2. The Federal Communications Commission, which oversees telecommunications.
3. The Senate Commerce Committee's Subcommittee on Communications; contact the committee itself, the chairman, the ranking member, and any of the other members you'd like.
4. The House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, including the committee itself, the chairman, the vice-chairman, and the ranking member. Plus any of the other members you feel like contacting.
5. The Federal Trade Commission, which hears consumer complaints.
6. Your U.S. Representative
7. Your Senators
8. Your Governor
9. Your State Legislators
10. ICANN's wildcard comment address
11. Finally, complain to the media. If they get enough letters on a topic, they'll run stories. Try the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Fox News, CBS News, ABC News, NBC News and MSNBC.

Remember, VeriSign is busy telling them its side of the story. We need to tell them ours!

Re:right..... (-5 sarcastic)

[pheared]

Especially since they are claiming that private companies can do better than:

b.root-servers.net USC/Information Sciences Institute
c.root-servers.net PSI.NET (bankrupted, now part of cogent)
d.root-servers.net University of Maryland
e.root-servers.net NASA
f.root-servers.net ISC
g.root-servers.net DoD
h.root-servers.net army.mil ... and so on.

What a bunch of fly by night volunteers.

Lies, Damned Lies, & Statistics

[ezraekman]

So, Stratton Sclavos says "The noise you're hearing publicly does not match the real impact of the [Sitefinder] system... ...We have asked for the data five times from anyone who has it--ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the IAB--and no one can produce data. All they can produce is these fringe stories."

Back on September 21s, Paul Twomey, president and CEO of Verisign said "As to your call for us to suspend the service, I would respectfully suggest that it would be premature to decide on any course of action until we first have had an opportunity to collect and review the available data." Well, have they seen this? It's a study that says:

Our analysis indicates that approximately 9% of Internet users at the time of the study did not receive Site Finder when they request a nonexistent .COM or .NET domain. More than half of this proportion results from China's apparent decision, effective beginning September 24-25, to block Site Finder, while the remainder reflects other network operators jointly.

The study also says:

We also note that relatively more intense blocking of Site Finder outside the US is precisely as anticipated by two distinct sets of concerns:

• 1. That Site Finder pages are always presented in English (notwithstanding users' language preferences)
• 2. That Site Finder pages are larger than ordinary error messages and therefore slower and more costly to transmit.

That seems pretty clear to me. It says that 91% of the entire internet was affected, in a manner that was more costly than necessary, and not user friendly to the majority of the people that saw it. (i.e. not in their native language.)

In addition, on October 7th, Verisign released a statement that said:

Prior to ICANN's October 3 directive to shut down the service, Site Finder had been used more than 48 million times by Internet users to get where they want to go online.

48 million. So... an independant study that Verisign called for, and Verisign themselves have found that the "real impact" of Sitefinder has been tremendous. And then Stratton Scalvos has the gall to say that "no one can produce data"?!